40 Years Ago Today

A bunch of Native American college students in California moved to Alcatraz for a few months, 19 to be exact, to occupy it in hopes of it being relinquished to the indians for their own purposes such as a tribal center and a place of worship since the previous one in SF had burnt down and the government had made no immediate plans to rebuild.

DUring the stay at Alcatraz they lived in the buildings sometimes without electricity and all the time without any phone service and sometimes without running water. During this time the prison was closed and was considered surplus property to the government.

From the article- Motive for the occupation was the government's general treatment of Indians. The U.S. 16 years earlier had begun a policy of terminating Indian reservations and relocating the inhabitants to urban areas.

"[The Alcatraz occupiers] wanted to focus attention on broken treaties, broken promises and termination of tribal areas," said Professor Troy Johnson, chairman of the American Indian studies program at California State University, Long Beach, and author of several publications on the occupation.

The event gathered a ton of media coverage resulting in change for these people. Check out the article.